Before and after Immanuel Kant

It was Hume's skepticism that
famously aroused Kant from his
'dogmatic slumbers' - that sleep of sufficient reason, that
everything is explicable if a rational gaze sweeps upon it. Hume
declared that our knowledge was based on habit, and our morality on
sentiment - and Kant went out to prove him wrong, to provide a
rational framework of knowledge and morality, which he did in the
Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical
Reason, but also of the rational basis of the aesthetic and the
religious in the Critique of Judgement. These are known as the
3 Critiques, for obvious reasons.

Transcendental
Philosophy

The Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) is perhaps the
most epic of these works, and in it Kant provides an analysis of
epistemology and metaphysics, establishing what he calls a 'transcendental'
philosophy, which means that there are certain universal structures
in the mind that transcend an individual consciousness; there are
certain facts that are true for every human mind, and these truths
are both necessary and universal for everyone. For example, the
reflection of light onto our retinas is (almost) always interpreted
as a colour value depending on the wavelength of that light. The
'colour' white is a wavelength very similar for almost every human on
earth, and so the fact that 'white' = wavelength x is true for
an African or an Asian or a European, whether we know about
wavelengths or not.

The 'Copernican Revolution'

Kant's
central thesis in CPR is no less than a 'Copernican
Revolution' in thought - in the same way that Copernicus confounded
traditional astronomy by positing that the Earth goes around
the sun and not vice versa, Kant posits that, instead of our
minds passively receiving 'sensations' or sense-data from the world
and constructing a picture in our minds in that way, we actually
project onto the world certain aspects of objectness, in order
to see objects. As Kant puts it, instead of "knowledge conforming to
objects", in actual fact "objects conform to knowledge."

An example of this is causality.
Hume had proven that there is no necessary connection between
any two objects in space and time. Snooker balls may go on to hit
other snooker balls, and we may theorize about angles and forces of
momentum, but just because event B seems to follow event A every
single time that we look at it, we cannot categorically say
that A 'causes' B. There is nothing in the behaviour of those objects
to prove causation without doubt. And if there is doubt, we cannot
make a law of causality. Hume was therefore declaring that there is
no law of causation - no causality. For you and me and Kant, this is
absurd. 999 times out of 1000, when you turn on a lightswitch, the
light is going to turn on. But causality is not a characteristic of
lights, as Hume proves; but it is a characteristic of the human mind,
as Kant proves. Causality is therefore one example of the projection
of the human mind onto the world of objects. Gravity is another.

This is certainly a reversal of all previous philosophy, and the
problem of the existence of the material world, ever since the
Presocratics, has been problematic. Bishop Berkeley,
earlier, had proposed that we are actually in the mind of God, as are
all objects, so that in fact no things have material existence in any
'real' sense. Hume, after Berkeley, concluded that we cannot have
any real knowledge of the material world. The gap between
consciousness, knowledge and the material world is too wide. Kant
goes some way towards rectifying this.

If he can prove that there are some categories that exist
in the mind of all humans, categories both necessary and universal
(therefore 'transcendental') in the way we conceive of objects, then
he can prove that we have some mental projections onto the world in
order to translate 'sensations'(the raw-material of the senses) into
concepts or ideas - and therefore knowledge.

The Transcendental Aesthetic (discussed in CPR) is
an analysis of the principles of sensory experience. The most basic
structures for all sense are space and time. Both space
and time are not inherent in the properties of objects; they are
projections by the mind on the external world (in the same way that
gravity and causality are). The Transscendental Ego is itself
timeless, outside time, but projects spatiality and temporality onto
the world. In the Kantian system, the three main faculties of the
mind are sense, the understanding, and reason.
Sense, obviously, is the part of the mind that receives bodily
sensations. As Hume previously characterized them, they are mere
sensations that are unconnected and are not united by any concept
such as self, or time, or causality; they appear in a continuous but
unlinked stream. It takes the faculty of the understanding to
make sense of these sensations, by characterizing them and
identifying them. Kant then declares that the faculty of
reason is really the ability to manipulate concepts that arise
from the categorization of sensations, but without actual direct
experience of those concepts - for example, in geometry, it is
unnecessary to understand every single triangle in existence. It is
only necessary to understand the concept of triangle,
mathematically, so that inferences can be made, using the faculty of
reason:

The Transcendental Analytic describes how this knowledge is
formulated, and analyses the transcendental principles of the
understanding. Most concepts come from experience, but there
are some that are presupposed in every experience, such as
causality. But how do they come to be presupposed? Kant answers that
they are classified in certain transcental categories that are
true for every person and true for every experience - in fact, a
precondition of our having an experience is that it can be classified
in one of 12 of these categories. If it cannot, then it is not a
experience. Kant famously goes on to prove that this is the case by
proving the existence of these 12 categories in his transcendental
deduction of the categories. But it is also famously
difficult.

The Bounds of Reason

Kant's CPR can be divided into a 'positive' half and a
'negative' half, the Analytic and the Dialectic. The Dialectic is an
attempt to put various other philosophies and philosophers in their
place, and the transcendental dialectic is highly critical of
the pretensions of reason; certain philosophical positions championed
by other philosophers who claim to use 'rationality' are attacked as
using "the logic of illusion." For example, previous proofs of the
existence of God by Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas and Rene Descartes
have all appealed to reason; Kant shows that this claim is false.

The Antinomies (nomos = 'law') are a step towards
showing the limits of claims to rationality in 'rational' argument:
it is perfectly possible, Kant acknowledges, that a proof for the
existence of, say, God can claim to use reason, to be a logical
argument. But at the same time it is possible to offer an opposing
point of view, also with the claim of rationality. In fact, the
antinomies are many metaphysical questions with opposed rational
arguments that prove opposite conclusions: for every argument for
God's existence, there is one against, and for every one arguing for
free will, or the immortality of the soul, there are also arguments
against. Kant thereby proves the illusory nature of reason; Reason is
the first port of call in our justification of metaphysical 'truths',
but we must be careful how we apply it. By showing these opposing
arguments, Kant did not want to belittle the faculty of reason,
however. He only wanted to stop the petty squabbling of the
metaphysicians.

Despite Kant's clear admiration for Newtonian science, the view of
the world as operating along clearly delineated mechanical laws of
great intricacy, it did not diminish his admiration for a Prime
Mover, a Creator. In fact, one of the aims of the CPR is to
clearly demarcate the boundaries of reason, to "limit knowledge in
order to make room for faith."

Edmund Husserl
(1859-1939) introduced a psychological element into philosophy. In
Epistemology (the study or theory of knowledge, from episteme)
there was a fundamental difficulty (strange as it might seem) in
proving the existence of the material world. There is no concrete
way, in terms of logic or science, that we can categorically prove
the existence of such a material world. Of course, we know it exists,
but as soon as we logically analyse this belief, at some stage it
seems to fall down.

Epistemologists of the analytic/positivist persuasion tend to get
concerned with the minutiae of arguments, whilst Husserl
concentrated instead on the things that are more important - we all
know that it exists, and even if it doesn't, we can treat it like it
does, and the laws of science still operate, so let us consider what
is really important in life. His catch-phrase: "To the things
themselves!"

Husserl proposed a 'phenomenological
method' as a technique for conducting phenomenological analyses.
He wanted to make possible "a descriptive account of the essential
structures of the directly given." By 'bracketing off' the existence
of the material world, the phenomenologist is better able to look at
the immediacy of experience, and isolate it from all assumptions of
existence, causation or material laws, thereby laying bare its
essential structure, the 'essence.'

What does this mean for the philosopher? This phenomenological
method restricts the philosopher's attention to the pure data of
consciousness, uncontaminated by scinetific or metaphysical
assumptions. Husserl's conception of the 'life-world' in his later
philosophy also expressed this immediacy - the personal world of the
individual as directly experienced, with the ego at the centre and
with all of its vital and emotional colourings.

Husserl managed to obtain quite an international following during
his editorship of the Annual for Philosophical &
Phenomenological Research, and a couple of his adherents were
Schiller and Heidegger.
Both Schiller and Heidegger held to the phenomenological principle
that philosophy is not empirical (i.e. related solely to
experience) but is the strictly self-evident insight into the
structure of experience. Both of these showed the influence of the
phenomenological movement: Schiller in his careful analysis of the
role that emotion plays in the morality of mankind, and in his
explorations of the human attitudes of resentment, sympathy and love;
Heidegger in his
investigations of human existence - what it means to be in the world
- termed by him being-in-the-world, as well as care,
resentment and finitude.

Existentialism

The roots of existentialism, as every schoolboy knows, lie with
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; the former a pessimistic, tormented
Christian, the other... erm, a pessimistic tormented atheist. The two
central themes which unite these thinkers are:

For Karl Jaspers(1883 - 1969), a German who came to
philosophy from the study of medicene and psychology, the purpose of
existence is the realisation of being; he was preoccupied with theme
i), ontology. Philosophizing, for Jaspers, is an internal activity
through which one comes to a better understanding of what it is to
be, to find or become oneself. It is an attempt to answer the
(ultimate) question of what Man is and what he can become. This
internal, subjective activity is wholly unlike the objective process
of science; solely through thought Man can become aware of the
deepest levels of Being.

It is through the 'extreme' situations that define the human
condition, thinks Jaspers, that human existence is revealed most
profoundly - such as death, guilt, suffering, and conflict.
Confrontation with such extremes leads to what he calls "the
illumination of existence."

Jean-Paul Sartre
(1905-1980) is popularly linked with 'café' existentialism. He
was mostly preoccupied with theme ii) - choice; and with choice,
responsibility. But in his Being & Nothingness he is
concerned for Being (ontology) and the threat of Nothingness,
nihilism. But the essence of man's Being is liberty, in his duty of
self-determination and his freedom of choice. The negation of this
responsibility towards self-determination (the unwillingness to face
up to the responsibility of freedom) he calls 'bad faith.' In bad
faith, men feebly deny their responsibility to make choices - and
therefore to make themselves - and flee from the truth of this
inescapable freedom; the person who denies free-will, the person who
immerses himself in work or religion, and so on.

Sartre, like Schopenhauer, was less a professional philosopher
than a Man of Letters - the large volume of plays and novels that he
wrote during his lifetime all assert the existentialist dogma of
human freedom, responsibility, and the innumerable mechanisms of
escaping it ('bad faith.') The environmental obstacles that men face
in trying to realise such freedom, such as poverty, lack of
education, bad upbringing and so on, can all be surmounted by
conscious decision, thinks Sartre; only in acts of freedom does man
achieve authenticity (also an important concept for
Heidegger).

Structuralism

This
philosophical movement, which received its highpoint in the 1960s and
1970s, also left quite a considerable mark on linguistics,
anthropology and literary theory. It all really stems from the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who believed that cultural
forms, belief systems and 'discourses' of every kind are best
understood by analogy with language or with properties of
language when considered from the pure objective viewpoint
without subjective time; only from that viewpoint can you analyse its
immanent structures of sound and sense. Language is not an
accumulation of independent conventions but an interlocking
system. Every element is what it is only by virtue of its
relation to every other element in the system.

It's impact on literary criticism was profound. Mere
interpretation of texts is fruitless; but the examination of
structural features of the text puts it on a more sound
footing when it comes to analysing a work. In fact, it provides a
firmer methodological grounding for the discipline of literary
criticism itself, although arguably this structural criticism within
literary theory starts with Aristotle's
Poetics. The real advance from the structuralists, however, is
in its reatment of standard literary devices such as metaphor and
metonymy (the placing of one word when meaning another), which are
the structural axes of all linguistic communication, and they perhaps
reach their highest expressive power in art forms such as poetry.

From Geneva, structuralism was adopted in France by the
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the literary
theorist Roland Barthes, the psychologist Jacques Lacan
and the Marxist sociologist Louis Althusser. Into philosophy
it continued with the celebrated thinkers Michel Foucault and
Jacques Derrida.

Lévi-Strauss concludes that there is nothing really
'primitive' about so-called 'primitive' languages and the 'primitive'
people who speak them, since (obviously) any people that can
establish or allow to evolve an extremely complex system of signs and
signifiers to communicate with each other, and which we can look on
with the rationalism of the Western linguist and therefore project
linguistic 'rules' back onto, is not the 'primitive' culture that we
think; it cannot be so trivialised. Now I suppose this observation is
within the orthodoxy of the politically correct.

In addition, the surprising patterns of similar behaviour around
the world, for example in ceremonies of rites de passage or
the similarity of many African tribes and, say, Shintoism in ancient
Japan in their ancestor worship, suggests a similarity of structure
of the human mind, with so many common elements. This is a return to
the idea of innate ideas which, if you have read about
Déscartes and Locke (the old rationalism/empiricism debate)
has been rather unfashionable, but in terms of structural linguistics
is reinforced by Noam Chomsky. But the analysis of structure
is not only mental, for Lévi-Strauss. There is also structure
in his analyses of patterns of kinship, mythology, art, religion,
ritual and even culinary traditions.

Deconstructionism

Jacques
Derrida wishes the school of deconstruction to be
disassociated from any particular trademark method: it is not merely
an analytic or critical tool, nor a method in itself, nor an
operation performed on a text. Deconstruction, he thinks, resists
both translation and interpretation. Which means that, to give you
any idea of it on a web site is to encapsulate it. And this is
something Derrida doesn't want. But I shall try anyway.

A great deal of the history of philosophy is concerned with
finding some ultimate metaphysical certainties or sources of meaning
which can characterize (Western) 'philosophy.' But the
grounding of philosophy cannot be encapsulated in this historical,
metaphysical context, he thinks. Instead, by reading philosophical
texts in a particular way (called 'deconstruction') he can expose the
metaphysical assumptions or presuppositions that philosophers use -
even those who appear to be hostile or dismissive of so-called
'metaphysics.' But instead of offering a metaphysical doctrine of his
own, he sought instead to analyse language and to provide a radical,
alternative perspective in which even the notion of a 'philosophical'
doctrine or thesis is questioned.

Derrida is concerned principally with the use of language
in Western thought. He deconstructs Plato's Phaedrus, the
father of Structuralism de Saussure, and Rousseau's
work on language. Traditionally, speaking is seen as 'above' writing;
writing is traditionally seen as being artificial or unnatural in its
use of signs - whereas speech is more natural and there is
less ambiguity because the speaker's intention is, in the
majority of cases, obvious. In speaking, therefore, there is the idea
of 'presence' - being bodily there, being mostly unambiguous because
of bodily signifiers or whatever.

Why is speaking considered more superior? Perhaps because
historically writing, of course, appears on the scene later. Speech
is considered, then, traditionally to be a more direct expression of
thought or logos, and writing to be a substitute for speech
because in writing the intentions of the communicator are more likely
to be betrayed.

Derrida, however, disagrees with this traditional view. He argues
that the logic of the texts promotes its own refutation - he says the
text turns against itself. Speech too, he says, communicates
in arbitrary, system-relative and material signs; thus, he overturns
the traditional view of speech being 'before' writing.

Derrida's Post-Structuralism

Since the Presocratics - and especially after Heraclitus' doctrine
of the unity of opposites - there is a trend to define a thing
relative to its opposite. For instance, what is 'left' is not
'right.' And so we end up with dichotomies for every concept or
object in the universe. In the Strcuturalist world, this was best
represented by Levi-Strauss' "raw" and the "cooked" in his
analysis of primitive peoples. For Derrida, the dichotomies of
interest to him are: speech/writing, soul/body,
intelligible/sensible, literal/metaphorical, natural/cultural and
masculine/feminine.

But, far from defining each in terms of its opposite, he subjects
them to an internal critique which destabilizes them. He then asks
the Kantian question of what makes these opposites possible in the
first place, and this takes language and thought to its outermost
limits. From this, Derrida posits new terminology, because the
present language is inadequate: archi-writing,
différence, textuality, and the
trace.

But if, as I stated earlier, deconstruction wishes not to
encapsulate things, then don't these new terms threaten to explain
the unexplainable? No. Because Derrida purposefully acknowledges that
they are inadequate and self-defeating (because they already
presuppose existing linguistic structures) and therefore his new
terminology is a move away from the structuralism that seeks to
enclose things within a system.

Différence

Différence is one of the new terms offered by
Derrida, which derives from French différer, meaning to
"differ" AND to "defer" - so much use is made of this ambiguity in
the mother tongue of this French thinker. It is the deferring and
slipping from meaning to meaning and moment to moment that occurs
continuously in the long linguistic chains in which we
communicate.

This is according to Derrida's reading of Husserl, and here
Derrida show the impossibility of Husserl's achieving what he set out
to do - a rigorously theorized account of structures and modalities
of internal time-consciousness; or of the relation between the
meaning of the communicator and the language he uses as a network of
differential signs. What Husserl wanted was, in effect, to find some
base transcendental signifiers within consciousness, meaning or
truth, something that would be a constant within consciousness, some
'logocentric' meaning. Derrida show that this is impossible, because
of the endless play of differing/deferring.